‘It wasn’t no accident … listen … we have to find that woman … she …’
The bespectacled shopkeeper held him down.
‘Hey, hey. Come on there. You had a mighty bad shake-up. Hang on in there.’
A station-wagon ambulance was drawing up, and suddenly the hands that were pressing his shoulders down now went to his armpits and helped him to his feet.
He went meekly and sat down heavily on the edge of the sidewalk where his assistants abandoned him in favour of a split interest between the hysterical mother and the two paramedics crouching under the trailer. To Josh, the people making up this macabre tableau were moving slowly and dreamily as though they were under water. He blinked as a fat, dusty police car rolled to a halt behind the truck and watched impassively as a sheriff’s deputy climbed into Jezebel and moved her to the side of the street with a shudder of badly-changed gears.
He said nothing as a square man who claimed to be the sheriff led him to the police car and gently guided him into the back seat. But as they drove off, his armour of numbness was shattered by the sight of the bereaved mother, still sitting on the sidewalk, now embraced clumsily around her thin shoulders by a rough-hewn man in paramedic’s coveralls. She lifted her head as he sat in the police car, raised a trembling hand towards him and opened her mouth to speak. He waited, steeling himself for the abuse, the unimaginable but inevitable verbal wounding.
With the window shut he couldn’t hear her words, but her face was so close, and she spoke so slowly he could lip-read as clearly as if she had shouted.
Josh’s heart lurched as he watched her mouth say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she bowed her head and gave in to her weeping once more.
‘No. I don’t understand.’
Dr McCardie tapped his pen on the desk and looked at her without sympathy.
‘It’s like I said, Miss Murray.’
‘Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth.’ He nodded politely but coolly, taking her point before continuing. ‘I realize that a scan may be the last thing you want when you obviously have your mind set on the termination, but in order to carry that termination out without complication, we need to know how the land lies.’
‘Why today? Why couldn’t you do this on Wednesday when I’m anaesthetized?’
The young man looked at her with an eyebrow raised and barely suppressed a sigh. ‘A scan is neither painful nor traumatic. What’s worrying me here is that you seem to believe that we’re just going to put everything right while you’re asleep. The termination is done under a local anaesthetic. You’ll be awake. But more important than your comfort, Elizabeth, you’re making a decision here. You’ll have to live with that decision when you get up and walk away. Do you understand what that means?’
She blinked at him.
‘Yes.’
He waited a few moments until the film of tears that was forming over her eyes was re-absorbed under his professionally dispassionate glare. ‘Then may we proceed?’
She looked across at the screen of the scanning machine, still showing the result of its last client, a tiny crescent blob adrift in a black universe.
Elizabeth stood up and slipped off her coat.
They tested him for alcohol, taking his blood and breath, gave him scrappy bits of food and a warm can of soda as they wrote down the fragments of his fevered statement. Then, with the comic solemnity of a man who believes himself to be of great importance, a thickset policeman led him into a small brick-lined cell. He waited until Josh sat down on the narrow bed by the wall, then nodded to him as though his prisoner had performed some act of kindness.
‘Shouldn’t be overlong till the test results get back. This don’t mean nothin’, bein’ in here for now. Just procedure.’
Josh looked up at him and returned the nod. The policeman closed the door gently and locked it.
The sleep that immediately overwhelmed Josh was so deep he had no recollection of even lying down on the hard mattress. His next sentient moment after the locking of the door was the unlocking of it, and that, he discovered with a bleary glance at his watch, was at least five hours later. A different policeman was regarding him coolly, waiting for him to come round.
‘It’s this way,’ he said, as though answering a question.
Josh stood up unsteadily and followed him out of the cell, along a corridor and into the room where the sheriff and his colleague had interviewed him hours before. He entered, sat down on one of the unsteady wooden chairs arranged around the metal table, and waited with his hands folded in front of him. The deputy pulled out a chair opposite Josh, sat down and cleared his throat.
Outside the closed door, phones were ringing in the distant office and men were talking in low voices. Not the voices of conspiracy or suppressed anger, but rather the voices of visitors to a desperately sick hospital patient. The deputy scratched at an armpit.
‘Got some more stuff to ask you if that’s amenable to yourself.’
Josh blinked and sat back, marginally opening his palms in acquiescence.
‘While you been sleepin’ we got most of the information we need ’bout what went on back there.’
Josh sat up. ‘The woman? You found her?’
The man looked back at Josh with a mixture of embarrassment and impatience. ‘I’m goin’ to stick to what we know here right now. You with me?’
Josh said nothing, and his silence was taken as permission to continue.
‘You ain’t been drinkin’ or poppin’ pills, an’ the marks from your tyres out on the road, along with them witnesses that saw it, say you weren’t speedin’ unduly neither. But I guess you know you’re in violation with your log book.’
Josh’s mouth twitched.
‘I told you where I pulled over, and for how long. I was going to fill it in when I stopped here.’
‘Trucker with all them years behind a wheel knows that’s against the law.’
‘Sure. I know it.’
The man’s demeanour was changing. Beneath his officious politeness, Josh could read a glint of malice.
‘Log books ain’t there for your recreation, mister. We got to know where and when you stop. In case you been doin’ somethin’ you shouldn’t.’
The policeman waited a beat, as if hoping for some display of emotion from his interviewee, then continued. ‘Like drivin’ illegal hours without sleepin’.’
Josh stared back at him, his closed mouth failing to conceal a jaw that was clenching, making the tiny muscles beneath his ears protrude.
‘You have a good sleep in the cell?’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
‘Mighty tired, huh?’
‘Yeah. Been working hard lately.’
The deputy sighed, long and deeply, as though growing weary of this. ‘Your stopover. It checked out. Highway patrol saw your truck there three times in the time you said you parked.’
Josh stared at him, watching him closely as he continued to see if there were a trap being set.
‘Guess it was lucky you pulled over